An Algorithm for Generating Explainable Corrections to Student Code

Abstract

Students in introductory computer science courses often need individualized help when they get stuck solving programming problems. But providing such help can be time-consuming and thought-intensive, and therefore difficult to scale as Computer Science classes grow larger in size. Automatically generated fixes with explanations have the potential to integrate into a variety of mechanisms for providing help to students who are stuck on a programming problem. In this paper, we present a data-driven algorithm for generating explainable fixes to student code. We evaluate a Python implementation of the algorithm by comparing its output at different stages of the algorithm to state-of-the-art systems with similar goals. Our algorithm outperforms existing systems that can analyze and fix beginner-written Python code. Further, fixes it generates conform very well to corrections written by human experts for an existing benchmark of code correction quality.